Growing up

Growing up in Doruelo country is a bad preparation for a study in Marawi, though I recall no such apprehensions when I was first presented the opportunity. It was April or May of 1980 and I was on my first job right after high school as a salesgirl at a tiny bazaar in the Supermarket area in Cotabato City, selling fake Levi pants and RTWs, and here came my sister Sheila with a thick wad of paper postmarked Mindanao State University, Marawi City. I was sixteen and my world was my Grandmother’s house in the barrio and the rice fields in another barrio where I would sometimes go with my mother and an aunt, to weed a neighbor’s farm or join a harvest team. Marawi, then as now, did not sound like big beautiful city, but for a confined, provincial girl, it boded well, like a promise of a new horizon. I recall my Lola’s tears, my elders’ fears: Kamusliman, they kept on saying, which meant Moros-infested, a country of traitors: it was no safe place for me. My mother was standing by the window, not saying anything to discourage me, while my cousins surrounded me, proffering all kinds of warnings and good advice; if she had her way, I knew she would send me to the best school: all her life all she wanted was an education for herself, which Grandmother denied her, she said, and so she got stuck with the six of us and a husband who was a philanderer until he was gunned down, yes, by a Muslim he made a score with, and yes, on his way to see his woman, while walking along Magallanes Street down across Dawn's Hotel.

The wad of papers said partial scholarship, and stipulated free tuition, free lodgings in the college dormitory, book allowance and a monthly stipend of two hundred compared to the full scholar’s three hundred which, considering the impecunious poverty we were used to, was generous enough. I could hear my mother’s heartbeat going for it: Get it! Get out of here! Get away!
 

It was an eight-hour boat ride aboard M/L Farida from the docks of Cotabato to the docks of Pagadian, and another seven hours across a rough road between Pagadian and Iligan. I was with three or four other kababayans, Engineering students in the higher year of the school I was going to. I remember them distinctly well, mainly because they were provincial like me, they all came from Libungan, a sleepy town next to ours slinking along rice paddies, Rolly, Elma, Rita, Virgie.  I don’t know what became of them now, except for Elma who was to be shot on the same or maybe another Pagadian-bound boat we had no choice but board, M/L Aida, by a boyfriend from the Army, many years later, for breaking it up with him.  Rolly was a friend, helpful during that first trip I made, telling me about the sights I would see, the things I would find, like it was a good beautiful place I was going to with them. Virgie sat by, and would tell me later that Rolly got a little crush on me. Rolly never had the courage to proposition me, probably thought I would marry into wealth and prosperity and wouldn’t do to suffer him or anyone else; it was Virgie who would proposition me, later, way way down the years, after one marriage and one miscarriage and a couple of live-in arrangements with girls she got to know abroad, in the Middle East and Malaysia before jail and deportment. In the dorm on campus she used to play bodyguard to me, shooing away the Maranao tomboys who couldnt wait to shag me.